Release the ‘Kraken’: Here’s a Look Back at 5 of Sidney Powell’s Nuttiest 2020 Election Claims in the Wake of Her Plea Deal
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
The strange saga of Sidney Powell came to a tragic juncture on Thursday as the former Donald Trump lawyer pled guilty to the criminal charges against her in Georgia.
One day before Powell was set to go on trial, she pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts of racketeering and conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. Powell’s guilty plea also entailed her admitting involvement with the scheme where pro-Trump operatives unlawfully breached Georgia county election systems in order to seek evidence supporting her claims about the 2020 election.
The plea deal means that Powell will serve six years of probation, pay a $6,000 fine and $2,700 in restitution to the state of Georgia, submit an apology letter, and she will be required to testify at related future trials.
The charges against Powell stem from her time as one of Trump’s lawyers after his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. She promised to unleash the “Kraken” with her attempts to help Trump overturn the results, but her legal efforts went nowhere as she pushed a whirlwind of conspiracy theories and ludicrous claims. This even caused Trump, his other lawyers, and several of the ex-president’s allies to turn their backs on her.
It’s difficult to craft a definitive list of Powell’s craziest moments; nonetheless, Mediaite has identified five instances that illustrate her rise to political infamy:
1. Poorly-Constructed Lawsuits:
When Powell claimed election fraud in Georgia and Michigan back in 2020, she filed a lawsuit in a place she called the “Northern Distrcoict of Georgia.” That was only the first major typo in the filing where Powell misspelled the word “ballots,” called Washington D.C. the “District of Colombia,” and the typos and grammatical errors only became more visible from there.
2. The Brian Kemp Conspiracy
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was considered an ally of Trump’s until he refused to go along with the president’s baseless claims that the election in his state was corrupted by mass fraud. Powell ran with this to an extreme as she claimed to have evidence that Kemp was complicit in the Trump-promoted conspiracy that Dominion Voting Systems’ machines were defrauding the election.
Powell was never able to prove this, but the funniest — or perhaps, saddest — part of this was when she claimed that Bernie Sanders was in on the whole thing.
They used ’em against their own candidates. The Democrats used them against Bernie Sanders in 2016, and somebody even told him what had been done to him when Hillary Clinton won that primary, and he didn’t. And instead of standing up for the American people and the right to vote, he sold out.
3. Trump Can Take Over Biden’s Term
Months after Biden was sworn into office, Powell spoke at a conference alongside Michael Flynn, the conspiratorial former Trump national security adviser who was once her client. It was during this engagement that Powell laughably claimed that Trump “can simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House and President Trump should be moved back in.”
I’m sure there’s not going to be credit for time lost, unfortunately, because the Constitution itself sets the date for inauguration, but he should definitely get the remainder of his term and make the best of it, that’s for sure.
4. Democrats Killed Harrison Deal
In a perverse imitation of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Powell claimed (again, with no evidence) that Democrats orchestrated the death of Harrison Deal, a campaign staffer to former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler. Deal was killed in 2020 after he was caught in a multi-vehicle car crash, but Powell insisted he was murdered to cover up to cover up the supposed election fraud in Georgia.
It’s organized. It’s well funded. It’s pure evil. They are willing to kill people, à la Kelly Loeffler’s aide in Georgia, who was suddenly blown up in his car on the way to a rally for her.
5. The Ghost of Hugo Chavez
You didn’t think we forgot about this, did you?
In the infamously blundering press conference held by Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s “elite strike force,” Powell let it flood as she dished out one preposterous claim after another. After insisting the CIA was in cahoots with Dominion, Powell claimed the election was stolen from Trump in a massive international conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, China, Smartmatic, George Soros, Antifa, the Clinton Foundation, and Hugo Chavez, who had been dead seven years by that point.
